On-Premises, Consumption-Based IT: 3 Ways It Can Benefit Your Business

Remember when cloud computing first started making serious inroads into enterprise IT about a decade ago? It got a warm welcome because it offered companies more choice. For the first time, businesses could choose between housing their own IT gear on-site or consuming it on a pay-as-you-go basis from a third-party provider. Exciting stuff.

But fast forward to 2017, and that cloud vs. on-prem choice is looking a bit dated. After all, both delivery models have their advantages. Why shouldn’t IT organizations enjoy the best of both worlds?

HPE Flexible Capacity makes that possible. Based on your initial capacity requirements and minimum commitment, Hewlett Packard Enterprise provides a pool of integrated infrastructure resources – compute, storage, networking, software, whatever fits your needs – that’s owned by HPE, but resides at your location. You can tap into that local buffer of IT resources as you need it, and pay only for the capacity you use. Plus, an HPE Data Center Care team provides enterprise-grade support, freeing up your admins from routine maintenance tasks for more value-add projects.

Flexible Capacity is a huge breakthrough in structuring IT resources, and I’ll be talking about it at HPE Discover 2017, coming up November 28-30 in Madrid; I’ve listed some must-see sessions at the end of this post. But here I want to summarize three big advantages that should put it at the top of every IT leader’s agenda. With HPE Flexible Capacity, you can:

1. Align spend to the business.

Historically, what used to happen was that IT would ask the business what was needed in terms of capacity for the next three years. But the business wouldn’t have a clear idea, and so somebody would end up having to take an educated guess and buy a tranche of infrastructure via an RFP. Or they might take a three- or four-year lease on the gear. But either way, it was a significant expenditure for fixed amount of equipment, without much science behind the decision. To be on the safe side and avoid running out of capacity, companies typically over-provisioned. They were continually paying for too much infrastructure.

Flexible Capacity lets you start small and then add resources as your business grows. You keep your infrastructure capacity close to the business demand, and you maximize utilization. Flexible Capacity can potentially turn a large slice of IT CapEx into OpEx1; you get billed for what you’re consuming, charged monthly in arrears based on agreed amounts. It enables you to bypass all of the issues around predicting capacity, as well as costly over-provisioning and the risk of under-provisioning.

2. Gain elasticity.

The cloud-like economics of Flexible Capacity is straightforward: the business knows that if they use 10 percent more of the buffer, the IT bill will go up by 10 percent. If they use 50% less, it will go down accordingly. In addition, it’s easy to add more infrastructure to extend the buffer if needed. Our metering technology will tell us that that might be advisable. We know how long the supply chain is for new equipment in any particular model, and we know when to recommend an order.

It all adds up to a highly elastic infrastructure platform that can handle even extremely volatile environments. We have some financial services customers, for example, that experience dramatic volume fluctuations during the day, based on which markets are open. But many businesses need a bit of additional scale occasionally. Retailers, of course, have predictable spikes around holiday seasons. Some online services businesses – online game providers for example – can even tie their capacity needs pretty closely to marketing campaigns. They consistently see a surge in activity when they launch a product, then a fall-off after players have tried out the new game. Flexible Capacity provides the elasticity in IT provisioning to handle that sort of model. And with Flexible Capacity you can always access Microsoft Azure services, with one contract, one invoice, one support partner.

3. Simplify IT.

The aim of Flexible Capacity, as with of much of HPE’s hybrid IT approach, is to help companies deploy and operate IT using standard building blocks. You can leverage our design, implementation and operational capabilities to transform IT at your own pace, and without having to invest significantly in high-end technical expertise. HPE takes on the implementation, management and maintenance of the solution so your team can focus on the business design and outcomes.

Think of Flexible Capacity as a kind of just-in-time solution for IT provisioning: it delivers just the infrastructure you need, in the form you need it, at exactly the right time.